Total Recall talk

Czech:
V zari budu mit v Praze na Get Splashed (byvaly Maxcon) prednasku o Rigging v Total Recall. Je to jedinecna prilezitost dozvedet se neco o tom, jak se delal film se stovkami efektovych zaberu jen mesic po jeho premiere. Termin je 8.9.2012. Prednaska je s oficialni podporou Prime Focus Film London.


http://www.get-splashed.cz/program.html


English:
I will have a talk about Rigging in Total Recall at Get Splashed CG Conference in september in Prague. Important note, this conference is czech/slovak language only.

Minimo VFX

A new visual effects studio Minimo VFX was founded in Barcelona, Spain by a couple of industry veterans. Their focus is building 3d character assets up to film quality level and also external supervision, pipeline design and previz. One of the most recent projects of the founders was big budget movie John Carter, featuring numbers of full CG characters interacting with real actors.


The focus of the company is similar to recently founded California based studio Creature Art and Mechanics.  This type of bussiness model is fairly new as it only offers part of the product and it might become new trend if succesull, opposed to full service of the most studios. Afterall, cars building factories also use service of other vendors, getting front panels built in one country, while electronic board made in another and then assembling it all together ;)


Btw. did you know, if you shuffle few letters, you get "MIMINO", which in czech means little baby ;)

Quake V

This is Carmack on Quake V:

"Nothing is scheduled here, people are not building this," Carmack said. "We went from the Quake 2 and the Quake 4 Strogg universe. We are at least tossing around the possibilities of going back to the bizarre, mixed up Cthulhu-ish Quake 1 world and rebooting that direction. "We think that would be a more interesting direction than doing more Strogg stuff after Quake 4. We certainly have strong factions internally that want to go do this."

Accidentally this is what I would vote for as well. My most favourite was Quake 1, because it has this unique mix of dark fantasy cover and atmosphere of medival times with sort of cyber mutation in it. This made it stand somewhere in completely different universe. Not military future, not ancient past. Simply unique.
The only thing needed is to save up enough to pay Trent Reznor to come back with his sound design and ambient music once again. His Ghosts I-IV actually recall that Quake 1 spirit sometimes.

ID games on steam

For all fans of ID games, there is huge discount for their titles now at STEAM ending 23 july!


http://store.steampowered.com/sub/14587/

Pacific Rim poster

New Pacific Rim poster, huge robot!!

id software beginnings

This is so far the most detailed documentary about how id software started. And some pictures I haven`t seen yet. Wow, as exciting as watching inventing first aeroplanes. Plus it reminds me old times around 1995 when me and two friends from highschool were also working on our game. For PC. Programmed in assembler. I did graphics with 256 color pallete and so on...

John Carmack and his VR prototype

John Carmack and his prototype of Virtual Reality Set


http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/06/06/john-carmack-is-making-a-virtual-reality-headset-500-kits-available-soon-video-interview-inside/

new creature studio founded

A group of film industry veterans have recently founded new studio called Creature Art and Mechanics at Marin County, California. Three of the founders are creature TDs known in 3d animation community for sharing their rigging experience from production through learning DVDs, online and CG conferences like Siggraph. Andrea Maiolo and Tim Naylor have worked in ILM on such movies as Star Wars, Hulk and Pirates of Carribean and with Chad Vernon have all experience with Maya custom tools and plugin development for high-end creature production.
From their press release the facility is planning to "...offer a "Creature Shop" that will hand-off characters and creatures to a studio or its vendors, and support the production of that asset through to final compositing, if necessary."

3d film editing based on game engines

I have just watched this beta version of Source Filmmaker, 3d interactive editing and animation tool from well known game company Valve Software.




This reminds me Autodesk also added built-in 3d editor called Camera Sequencer for Maya 2011:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=15247341&linkID=9242256
This also can import Final Cut Pro edit file to start from a reference sequence. Although I`ve never used it, it seems to offer pretty much the same basic features - 3d environment using Viewport 2.0 with directX, camera/shot sequence and character body/facial animation (using any rig and animation tools in Maya).
Although for those who are not owning Maya license, Source Filmmaker and similar tools could be a price alternative.
And this adds to general trend today where gaming software starts to offer some use in broadcast and film industry as well. Like recent release of CryEngine Cinebox environment for public use (supports alembic geometry cache, OpenEXR, FBX etc.) and cinematic quality interactive renderer Unreal Engine 4 from Epic (which is so far only as a game dedicated engine).